Vietnam social commerce platform Aemi announced that it has recently raised $2 million in a pre-seed funding round. Aemi is an online business-to-business (B2B) marketplace connecting social commerce entrepreneurs to major and niche Asian health and beauty brands.
Singapore’s C2C buying platform Carousell has signed a deal to acquire omnichannel fashion recommerce retailer Refash in Singapore. Off the back of its partnership with Ox Street to power authentication capabilities for secondhand streetwear, the acquisition reflects the group’s laser-focused drive to solve barriers of convenience and trust in selling and buying secondhand.
Chile-based Xepelin is in the B2B Latam payment industry via a SaaS payments infrastructure, that includes financial information in real time, embedded financial services and data models, all to be a company’s “digital CFO”. The company raised US$230 million in an equity and debt Series A round last year, led by Kaszek, and since then expanded into Mexico.
There’s probably no limit to Amazon’s greed – because capitalism – but there are constraints as governments regulate BigTech more aggressively and, just maybe, the free market works its wonders. Amazon cited “seller sentiment related to the fee” in its statement pulling back from its planned 2% fee on sellers who don’t use its Prime fulfillment services. But looming antitrust cases likely had something to do with it.